Tips for beginners with Puppet (server automation)

Since Puppet is written in Ruby, some of its syntax are Ruby-specific (I would not know for sure since I have not learned about Ruby yet). I'll try to update this post so beginners to Puppet and strangers to Ruby can get pass the unwanted headache.

Case-sensitivity

Case-changing is one of the source of confusions. If you see this error:

"Could not find dependency Class[changeTimeZone] for Node[baseserver]"

And in your nodes.pp you have:

node baseServer {
  require changeTimeZone
}

Change it to all lower case will fix the problem

Require a definition within a class

The syntax is

exec { "RunSomething":
  command => "abc",
  require => MyClass::MyFunction["def"],